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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.

    And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.


  • Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

    Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.


  • Microsoft has been slowly building toward requiring these subscriptions for enterprise for some time now. That is where Windows365 is ultimately going at an enterprise level, management just doesn’t realize it yet or are aware of how powerless they are to stop it.

    Because Microsoft should’ve been broken up in the 90s. They definitely need to be broken up now. Same with a number of companies really, but Microsoft has a unique position to really hold enterprise and government by the balls.



  • Others have pointed out that the article is jumping to conclusions by excluding the very and actually well documented economic factors at play here.

    It is crunchy/granola technophobia. People need to keep in mind that popular (scientific, for the time) opinion used to be that excessive reading was had for children and adults. It is as old as our written records actually, going back to a handful of Greek historians warning about it even.

    If people wanted the best for babies then we’d be raising them in collectives, with multigenerational households being the norm and free food, healthcare, and childcare widely available with few string attached. Some places already are close to all of those things.

    But it is so much easier to clutch pearls and blame the iPad. It isn’t like brains shut off. They also used to argue that video games causes inadequate social and motor skill development and now fucking surgeons play games to build motor skills.

    I’m sure we’ll hear that screentime proclaims “hail Satan” just as soon as they find a way to play the iPad in reverse.



  • I agree that most people don’t need SUVs. And even more don’t need a truck. But few others are forced to drive as much nor as far as Americans on a daily basis, so we don’t give a shit if people in other countries with robust public transport sometimes have to drive places in their (comparatively) small countries with their families.

    TIL that a dubious 15% is also === 95%.

    Edit: that is to say, this isn’t as simple as “LOL Americans fat, Americans dumb.” The same old Euro arguments don’t work on this one. Civil planning is completely fucked here. It isn’t just bad, it is actively hostile to non-drivers.

    And SUVs in particular can get these massive tax advantages that cars don’t get. Same with some models of truck. Plus, marketing is highly effective and nearly totally unregulated like so much else over here.

    You have morons giving themselves brain damage for the right to own gas stoves, and we have similar morons suffocating themselves and everyone else by insisting they need huge vehicles. And the government actively encourages it.


  • The US should really just directly employ regional workers to handle these projects. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in public construction projects, and the profit motive requires an inefficient use of tax dollars since we must pay a completely useless margin just so somebody can become richer for doing zero work.

    We also need to stop expanding highways since additional lanes have been proven to not help congestion, and actually worsens it because it encourages more driving.


  • It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.

    Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.

    And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.

    People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.

    Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.

    The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.


  • These people are just coping and lying via social media. Baulder’s Gate 3, while Budget undisclosed, was surely made for less than what some of the richest companies in the industry spend on shit game products like Modern Warfare 2 or Assassins Creed games which have quarter of a billion dollars budgets or better.

    Latina put this game into early access at full price and ate shit for it. I’ve been playing it for years already, first on Stadia (where it was already excellent, just clearly unfinished).

    Tangent, I’m sick of these knuckleheads talking about Larian as if they aren’t a western gaming company based out of Belgium and employing Europeans and others. They know the anti-sino sentiment is politically strong which is why they point to minority shareholdings by Tencent and label Larian an eastern company.

    Epic has a bigger claim to being a non-Western gaming company since Tencent owns almost half of them by itself.

    These particular devs are apparently either astroturfing messages with political undertones for their employers, chronically online and in desperate need of some Tumblr therapy, or have a conservative’s guilty conscience and are projecting their inadequacy onto everyone else.


  • They are definitely turning on Jesus and have been for quite some time now. There is an interesting statement from the former head of SBC wherein he states churchgoers are finding Jesus’ supposed teachings as being too woke and part of a liberal agenda. Can’t make this up. It was only a matter of time.

    But Jesus also didn’t like mixing. That is why he instructed the apostles and other adherents to never teach gentiles and Samaritans. That was retconned years later by the church because they said people had visions of a resurrected jesus commanding them to mix with gentiles. But for a while there it was very much a racial/ethno in-group only. That is why Jesus supposedly stated he taught in parables; so gentiles wouldnt understand what he was talking about and find salvation. That is what Matthew 13:11-17 is about.

    People need to stop characterizing Jesus as some socialists woke advocate like I see in this thread. His character wasn’t. He didn’t preach universal love and compassion, and he taught contradictory messages about pacifism probably because dozens of people created this character over centuries.

    I honestly think people want to think the religion can’t be that bad and that the adherents are just awful.



  • I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

    What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

    I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

    A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.






  • Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.

    Like tablet-friendly UI.

    And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.

    Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.


  • Adding onto that, the quality of Reddit content [in my former subreddits] has slid dramatically in my opinion. Sure, those niche communities will exist and persist for a while. But, as more tech pros move to the Fediverse I have to imagine that is where a lot of information will reside going forward. Hopefully it becomes or remains discoverable. I get some glimmers of this happening with the various Steam Deck communities here. It is already happening with the various programming communities.

    I think a far more likely thing to happen is that you get people scrapping the Fediverse for content to repost on Reddit, like what happens with Facebook and Instagram users scraping TikTok for content to repost. Social networks these days seem surprisingly sticky now that it isn’t just a place where all your friends are at.